A Film Canon

It makes sense that the most beautiful and accomplished Jane Austen adaptation is, first and foremost, a masterpiece of screenwriting. Emma Thompson polished and pared back the screenplay for close to five years, with the result that there's roughly the same amount of dialogue, proportionately, as in Austen's novel. Not only does this do away with the talkiness, the insistence on the formality and exoticism of nineteenth-century English, that suffuses most subsequent Austen adaptations, but it fills out the film with the very moments of quiet, pregnant observation, the penetrating, descriptive silences, that presumably prompted Austen's novels in the first place. In other words, by transforming Austen's prose style into a series of sight-lines - the quiet looks that pass between women - and panning away from any utterance that's too self-consciously ornate, Thompson ensures that her portrait of Elinor Dashwood is simultaneously about as economically pellucid a cinematic portrait of Austen herself as we're likely to see. Similarly, by subsuming Austen into silence, Thompson gives Ang Lee the opportunity to direct everything that remains silent, or unspoken, in Austen's universe. Granted, Sense And Sensibility is the least silent of Austen's novels - it's where she most indulges her tendencies towards sensibility, romanticism, landscape - but that very fact is what prevents Lee's gesture ever feeling too crudely revisionist, and more in the spirit of a tacit completion, as if Sense And Sensibility were also the Austen novel that most yearned for cinematic consummation. In any case, it's certainly Austen's greenest novel, and, with that in mind, Lee understands the Dashwoods' movement from manor to cottage as little more than a lavishly increased window-to-room ratio - at least two-thirds of the film takes place outside, and, as for the rest, there's a window or pastoral painting in virtually every scene. In another director's hands, this might mitigate against Austen's chambered, domestic modesty, but Lee's taste for the frame, for glassy, photographic lyricism, means that his lush, pastoral sweeps never feel like anything more than the frozen tumult of a distended greenhouse, or treehouse, even when they approach the rainswept Bronte-topographies that bookend the action, much like the establishing shots in Brokeback Mountain - a Constable painting nearly come to life. Even the London interlude partakes of this lyricism - a fungible proliferation of foliage-fabric, manicured according to the most elegant late Georgian topiary, it's spread out as a single epiphytic surface in which even the books seem moments away from the trees that produced them, vegetation become ratiocination in a shimmering, spectral evocation of the industry that's always just out of Austen's scope. In the end, it's a vision that owes as much to Peter Greenaway's grids as Merchant Ivory's gorgeousness - Lee made all the actors meditate during filming - in which, for all the subtlety and dignity of the male leads, romance is little more than a series of aching vistas, and Austen's astringent generosity is drawn out in all its exquisite, trembling contradictions.